PDF annotations lost

DTTG often shows me a blanc screen with “Nothing selected” even though I had a file/document open last time I used it. I did not think much of it other than it being a nuisance. However, today a large PDF I have been reviewing and annotating since a few weeks did not show up but I got the “nothing selected” bug. The file was still in DTTG but upon selecting it, no annotations. Knowing that the PDF synced with my Mac successfully before (with the annotations coming through just fine), I opened the synced file in DT - same result; all annotations are gone.

Selecting a few of my other recently reviewed and annotated PDFs show that some still have their annotations some do no longer have them.

This is a lot of work lost. I am hoping the annotations are still lurking somewhere and simply need to be linked/attached to the PDF?

I feel like punching something.

Sorry to hear about this.
We have no other such reports of an issue like this.

  • What app were you annotating the PDF in?
  • And are you saying you had DEVONthink To Go open but not frontmost with a PDF selected for weeks?

sorry to hear that, too - I cross my fingers you‘ll able to recover your work.

I know, it‘s not a good point in time to say this now, but, you always should have a backup to prevent the loss of valuable work.

Maybe you have a chance to open the PDF on the Mac using the Finder (using Preview.app) and recover an earlier version of that PDF?? (not sure if this works because the changes were made outside of Preview.app) - it sounds you don‘t have a Timemachine based Backup&Recover in place…

It might be worth opening a copy of the PDF in every PDF editor you have available, just to be sure the annotations don’t appear in one or the other.

Is it actually the case that you don’t have backups of the DT databases stored on your Mac? If you do have, it is possible to retrieve individual files (by restoring the database to a different location, closing all databases in DT, opening the restored database, finding the record in question, duplicating it to the global inbox, closing the restored database, and then reopening your current databases, removing from them the “damaged” record, replacing it with the restored version in the global inbox).

I annotate in DTTG and only DTTG. I use other apps on PDFs in general but annotate in DTTG exclusively. The PDF I discovered this on is a 600+ page document. I have had this PDF open on DTTG for a little over 2 weeks, annotating as I went reviewing. I didn’t switch to other PDFs in DTTG during this time. I have not reviewed it on my Mac with other apps. Yes, it is a massive doc that consumes all my time.

I use other apps on that iPad and switch between DTTG and those but within DTTG only scrolled, searched and annotated that single doc.

At one point I had the doc open on my Mac and saw the annotations coming through just fine. But since reviewing PDFs on the iPad is much more natural to me, I did no work on that PDF with the Mac.

I see the last update on DTTG was jan 12 on my iPad - the annotations were fine yesterday so it does not seem related to that update. I do experience WiFi outages as of a few months back but cannot say that has anything to do with this, just wanted to let you know.

Yes, this is what I ended up doing. I did manage to get a backup from 3 days ago, so some work lost but not a ton. I am going to see if the other docs can be restored the same way.

One never knows the quality of the backup until a recovery is needed…

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Just as a clarification: Are you using the iPad in portrait or landscape orientation?

Portrait primarily if not only. The text i am going through at the moment has no pages that are better reviewed in landscape.

Does either mode make a difference in this respect? Or you just want to define the boundaries of the problem?

For my own education; where are annotations (scribbles in the text, highlights and such) get stored? Are they simply attached to the existing PDF? If so, could a (simplistic) check constitute of a date/time stamp verification at the end of a day’s work or in comparisson with other versions? Is there a way to extract the annotations so they can be shown and compared? The DT workflow is a significant part of my work life and thinking, gotta admit i am a bit jittery now and want to regain some trust in it.

Annotations are added at the end of the PDF with standard PDF annotation format. You can check the date and time (and size) of the file to see how it grows.

Does either mode make a difference in this respect? Or you just want to define the boundaries of the problem?

Defining the issue a bit more.

For my own education; where are annotations (scribbles in the text, highlights and such) get stored? Are they simply attached to the existing PDF?

We are doing nothing clever here (and it’s actually a third-party framework)_. Annotations are part of the internal data of the PDF (except with some properietary apps, though that’s not applicable here).

Is there a way to extract the annotations so they can be shown and compared?

Not in DEVONthink To Go.
In DEVONthink there is a Tools > Summarize Highlights that can make a document containing highlighted passages from a PDF.

The DT workflow is a significant part of my work life and thinking, gotta admit i am a bit jittery now and want to regain some trust in it.

This is the only such report I have seen so far.

I just saw this log, no idea if this has anything to do with the issue I reported above, just providing it for your logs. I do see log entries like these fairly regularly. The Mac this log originates from was (or was expected to have been) connected to the WiFi/internet. “mobile” is the name of the database I use to shuffle documents between Mac and iPad.